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In 1999, an exciting new Toronto theatre company with the strange name of Soulpepper launched its second season.

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And perhaps the highlight was Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a production that, with Daniel Brooks at the helm, sailed on to win a Dora Award.

Fast forward to 2013. For the first time in its history, Soulpepper is doing a new production (as distinct from a revival) of a play that it has already staged. Brooks is back with the same creative team but with only one of the original cast, Diego Matamoros.

What does it signify? Well, that we’re all getting older, for one thing.

But older, in this case, means even better. That 1999 production was excellent, a model of crispness and clarity and with well-shaped contrasts between light and dark, dryness and humour.

Yet, with Brooks again directing and with the same design team, this Endgame seems to have taken on even more weight and purpose.

The plot is simplicity itself. Not a heck of a lot happens but the end is surely coming.

We’re in some strange, post-apocalyptic world. Out of a window high up stage left, The servant Clov (Matamaros — shuffling, forgetful, occasionally exploding in anger) can see the ocean; out of its counterpart stage right, he can see the ruins of what was once the world.

Hamm (a regal yet meditative Joseph Ziegler) is sitting in a makeshift wheelchair. One by one, his senses have been stripped away from him. He can’t stand up, he is blind and going deaf. Under his command is Clov, who can’t sit down and is having eye trouble but fetches and carries for Hamm.

Confined in a pair of dustbins, meanwhile, are the ancient figures of Nagg (Eric Peterson) and Nell (Maria Vacratsis). Nell is gently fading away but there’s certainly life left in Peterson’s feisty, demanding Nagg.

At the core of all these parallel and overlapping relationships is need, emotional even more so than physical. It’s the need to be wanted that stops Clov from simply walking out of a hellish situation — that and the fact that there’s nowhere else to go.

But everyone soldiers on, right to the end, struggling to connect, to feel, to understand, to carry on living.

Brooks’ musical ear is as well attuned as ever, freeing the play and the actors to find their own tempo and rhythms. But there are new depths and insights here as well. And they are chilling in the extreme.

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